From the Woods to the Mill: How Rural-Built Tech is Modernizing the Timber Supply Chain

Across rural America, entrepreneurs are building technology solutions for industries they know deeply. Waldo, a CORI Innovation Fund portfolio company based in Chassell, Michigan, is doing just that.

Waldo is bringing digital operations management to the timber supply chain - helping land managers, loggers, truckers, mills, and landowners move away from the decades-old paper-based systems and toward faster, more transparent, more connected workflows.

The company was founded by second-generation logger Leo Huhta, and that lived experience shows. Waldo is not technology built at a distance from the industry it serves. It is built around the realities of forestry work.

At the center of Waldo's platform is the trip ticket - the record that follows a load of timber from the harvest site to its destination. Across the industry, these tickets are often still created on paper, manually entered, reconciled against mill records, and compiled into reports. That system creates delays, errors, duplicated work, and limited real-time visibility into what is happening in the field.

Waldo digitizes that process. Its platform allows users to create digital tickets in the field, track loads, manage harvest activity, compile compliance reporting, reconcile tickets and scale slips, issue invoices, and improve communication across the supply chain.

For forestry, this is not just a software upgrade. It is an industry-wide operational shift. For contractors and truckers, the shift eliminates the need for paper trip books and weekly summary prep. For landowners and managers, it creates faster visibility into active harvest jobs, load counts, species breakdowns, and reporting. For the broader supply chain, it means cleaner data and fewer delays.